Ask 10 SEO experts what free SEO tools they use or recommend, and you will likely get 10 different answers.
No one answer will be right, nor will any be wrong.
The truth is that there are lots of tools available, and not one of them can provide you with all the information you might want for SEO purposes.
One thing is certain: the tools which these consultants might be using will mostly be paid tools. The cost of each tool will range from as little as $10 per month to as high as $1000 per month for agencies who need high capacity and multiple user access for specific tools.
If you’re just getting started or do not like the idea of paying out for these tools, then you need to consider some tools that come from the source that all these other tools are trying to second guess: Google. They have three tools which can help you with your website SEO, and they are free.
You should be aware of how important keywords are to SEO, so one of your first tasks is to research the keywords you should be targeting within your industry or niche. The tool you need for this is Google’s Keyword Planner Tool. To use this tool is free, however, you will need to sign up for a Google Ads account, if you haven’t already done so, to gain access to the tool.
With the tool, you can enter possible search terms and it will give an approximate number of monthly searches, and levels of competition for that term. It will also generate lots of suggestions for similar keywords that Google believes are related to your main search term. A single term like ‘dog grooming’ can return hundreds of related keyword suggestions.
Imagine if you ran a dog grooming service and had no idea what search terms to try to rank for. With this tool, Google is giving you all those keyword suggestions, it provides search levels, how hard it is going to be to rank for them in terms of competition, and it does so in seconds. Without this tool, the same research could take hours or days.
Once you have your website built and it has gone live, Google has a free tool called ‘Google Analytics’ which helps you to track some very important data relating to your website’s performance. It does require a bit of setting up, but it is very easily learned, or you could pay someone on Fiverr to do it for you for a small fee.
Once set up it provides a lot of data, including:
- Visitor/traffic numbers
- Pages they visit
- Most visited pages
- Time spent on site
- Your website’s loading speed
- Bounce rates
- Which sites visitors clicked from to yours
- Location of visitors
- Conversion rates for opt-ins or sales
- …and so much more
All this data is very valuable in terms of you being able to further optimise your website for both your visitors and for Google’s ranking factors.
The third tool from Google is called Google Search Console. This provides information and feedback in relation to what Google sees when its spiders crawl your site. In other words, it tells what is helping you in terms of your search engine ranking, and where you need to improve.
At no cost, Google tells you a lot about what you can do to rank your website higher. Many SEO consultants use this same tool as part of their work.
